Family court hurts

09/08/2026

09/07/2026

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South Korea's birth rate has collapsed to one of the lowest ever recorded anywhere in the world — and nowhere is that felt more acutely than in the countryside, where young families have left for the cities in search of work, leaving rural schools to slowly empty out, grade by grade.

At Daegu Elementary in Gangjin County, principal Lee Ju-young went looking for just one child to enroll as a first grader. "We went around villages looking for just one precious kid," she said. "There was none." The school, which once held 90 students per grade in the 1980s, was down to 22 students total.

So the school did something no one expected: it opened its doors to the grandmothers of the village instead.

Eight women, ages 56 to 80, enrolled as first graders. Among them was 70-year-old Hwang Wol-geum, illiterate her entire life after being kept home as a child to tend pigs, gather firewood, and care for her younger siblings while other children walked to school. She went on to raise six children of her own, sending every one of them through high school or college — all while quietly carrying the ache of never learning to read or write herself. "Writing letters to my children," she said, "that's what I dreamed of the most."

Now she rides the same yellow school bus every morning as three of her own grandchildren.

She's not alone. At Bangrim Primary School in Gangwon province, grandmothers now share classrooms with their own grandkids, sounding out letters side by side. At Woldeung Elementary, which shrank from 1,200 students in 1968 down to just 29, an 84-year-old woman named Nam became one of its second graders.

Teachers say the grandmothers are some of the most dedicated students they've ever had. "They are probably the only students here asking for more homework," one teacher said.

It's not just their own long-delayed education at stake. By filling the seats and keeping these schools alive, these women may be preserving the one thing that could someday bring young families back to the villages they grew up in — a school still standing, waiting for the next generation to walk through its doors.

09/07/2026

Gabriel Matzneff wasn't hiding anything. For decades, this prominent French writer openly described his sexual relationships with teenage girls in his published diaries, on television talk shows, in award-winning books. He detailed encounters with children as young as 13. He appeared on national television discussing these relationships as sophisticated transgression, artistic freedom.

French literary circles didn't condemn him. They celebrated him. Published him. Gave him prestigious prizes. When a Canadian writer challenged him on live television in 1990, the French intellectuals on the panel mocked her as puritanical. The cultural elite framed criticism as Anglo-Saxon prudishness incompatible with French sophistication.

Vanessa Springora was 14 when Matzneff began pursuing her in 1986. She was a lonely, bookish teenager from a broken home. He was 50, famous, powerful. He showered her with handwritten letters, intellectual conversation, comparisons to literary heroines. She felt chosen. Special.

The relationship lasted two years. He wrote about it in his published diaries, calling her "V" but including enough detail that people who knew her could identify her. For decades, their relationship was publicly framed as romantic, intellectual, even glamorous.

Only years later did Springora understand what had actually happened: she had been deliberately groomed and exploited by an adult who had done this to multiple girls before her. What seemed like mutual romance was calculated predation. The psychological damage lasted decades. Shame. Confusion. Anger at being turned into literary material without consent.

In January 2020, Vanessa Springora, then 47, published "Le Consentement" (Consent). The memoir didn't read like revenge. It read like painful, hard-won clarity about grooming, power, and cultural systems that enable abuse.

She described with precision how grooming works. How admiration from a powerful adult becomes psychological influence over a vulnerable teenager. How cultural approval masks exploitation. How a young person can genuinely believe they're freely choosing something that was carefully engineered by an adult who understood exactly what he was doing.

France's response was seismic.

Publishers immediately stopped distributing Matzneff's books. Prosecutors opened a criminal investigation based on his own published writings. He fled to Italy. The Renaudot Prize committee faced intense criticism for honoring him in 2013.

But more importantly, an entire nation was forced to confront decades of complicity. How had literary France normalized, celebrated, and protected sexual relationships between adult men and teenage girls? How many similar stories had been dismissed because victims were young, female, or overshadowed by celebrated male names?

The book shifted the narrative from individual scandal to structural critique. It implicated publishers, critics, television producers, prize committees, intellectuals who had defended Matzneff and attacked his critics for decades.

France strengthened its consent laws in 2021, establishing that children under 15 cannot legally consent to sexual acts with adults. The publishing industry began reexamining its historical complicity. The cultural conversation fundamentally shifted from romanticizing exploitation as artistic freedom to recognizing it as criminal abuse regardless of literary talent.

Vanessa Springora reclaimed her story from the man who had turned her teenage exploitation into his published material. She refused to stay silent to protect a literary reputation built partially on describing his abuse of her.

The 14-year-old girl who was groomed by a celebrated writer became the woman who dismantled the system that protected him.

That's not revenge. That's justice. Proof that truth-telling, even decades later, even against powerful cultural forces, can force accountability and change.



~The History Today